GSC have released another trailer showing off some of the environmental details for Stalker prequel Clear Sky. We’ve seen some of the tech-demo stuff before, but the glimpses of the new regions are rather tantalising.

I loved the voice acting in the original, and definitely hope they don’t mess with that part of the game. There was a gameplay video a while ago where all the NPCs sounded like American sit-com actors, and I can only hope those were placeholder voices, as it was all wrong and terrible.

Not so fussed about the accents, but I did like the incidental NPCs talking and making jokes (I think they were jokes at least) in Russian. By all means translate what they are saying in subtitles but leave the voices in Russian.

It’ll be an interesting change of pace to be rifling through those abandoned towns, rather than trekking through fields and sparse ruins; I’m not relishing fighting bandits there (…I am, actually.)

I hope the faction system is better balanced than in the original — go against Duty, and the ‘hub’ of the game world becomes enemy territory; ridiculous! (not to mention how late you become acquainted with the powers behind Duty, as opposed to Lukash). …I just wanted to complain about that, as I’m halfway through the game again right now, and I never have liked the ‘farmhouse’ dilemma — one way is a gunfight that cuts you off from a fistful of enjoyable missions, the other way all but borks your game.
Still, STALKER is awesome.

Oh, and yeah, I’m loving the FX — the rain looks so much better. This’ll give my new card the workout I’ve been longing for.

Not only does it look so pretty it makes my graphics card hurt, but some of those shots look sunny! I love all the new lighting effects too.
I’ve not been able to play Stalker for a couple of months now, purely because it’s so bloody drizzely…

edit: what is that big grid thingy? Some sort of radar?
and how odd must it be to see you own face in a game?

Macbeth: Get the first; it needs a good rig itself for full prettiness (my 9800GTX is gulping it down and laughing, but it still chokes intermittently when there’s a lightning storm in the game) but if you use static lighting, it’s more forgiving. Should be nice and cheap these days, too, well worth the money.

There’s a lot of talk of instability, but only crashes I’ve had have been due to mods (easily installable/removable with the STALKER Smart Mod Manager, which is… around somewhere, I dunno. Go play it first).

I really like the color palette of STALKER, especially when compared to most of the games this generation. STALKER has a very muted color palette, but there’s still color in there. It was like someone went and turned down the color saturation on my monitor. Even better, it’s not just brown, grey, and green like most “next-gen” games.

“Prequel of the most atmospheric game of 2007″, that I agree with. The atmosphere in the first game was unlike anything I had experienced before. I had a hard time getting the game to not crash, changed a few settings at a time and when I ran I never touched the settings again. Hope this is more stable in that regard. And leave American voices out of this game please. If you happen to do American voices than at least give us the option to use Russian with English subtitles. Or hire Peter Stormare to do all the russian voices. :D

Shadow of Chernobyl had me in an almost constant state of horrified fascination, and I’m trusting this one to do the same. I really hope it’s more stable though as I had to wait until the second patch before it was properly playable on my machine.

To be honest, at this point I don’t even care about the faction stuff or storyline; I just want to poke around in the terrain and explore spooky derelict buildings. Bigger maps and more areas is all I ever wanted from SoC :)

James T: No one should play Stalker in static lighting unless they absolutely must. It’s a small crime given how good it looks with dynamic.
Have you heard they’re using a point defense system for factional fighting? You can hook up with guys and kick the bandits out of somewhere and then hold it. I think you have a reputation and thingsof that sort as well. And all the factions are apprently in the mix; bandits, Stalkers, Mercs, army, duty, liberty/freedom and maybe others.
It might all get too complex introducing that sort of thing and weaving a story through it, so I don’t know how that will go. But the idea of constantly waring factional Alife with real use of territory is brilliant and could be endlessly amusing.

This game is going to be fucking intense.
Basically.
Stalker is easily one of my top 5 games of all time. Yes it was buggy and yes I couldn’t play it for about 4 months after launch due to these bugs. But it still didn’t stop it from just being amazing really.
Hopefully, this game will be better then Stalker: COC, which just makes me too excited for words.

It just sucks that its released the day before my sisters wedding *shakes fist*

I always regretted there wasn’t a way to explain yourself if you shot a fellow stalker by accident, it’d be nice to be able to say sorry, multiplayer style.

I wanted to be able to confront assassination-targeted Loners so that other people who happened to be at that fireplace or in that group wouldn’t necessarily turn on me when the fight started.
“Aha, YOU’RE the one who shot that Freedom-er in cold blood!”
“Yes, and you’ll never take me alive, Marked One! Ha ha ha!”
As it is I just have to pretend they’re all accomplices and wipe out the lot of ‘em.

this is going to be awesome!
From what we’ve seen/heard looks like GSC has learnt lessons from the Stalker.
And my god how cool does that smoke look. God bless GPU physics!
Looks like someones going to put it to good use.